


The Carbon in Our Souls

by mllelaurel



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Trans Character, Canon-typical Temporary Character Death, F/M, Family Found and Otherwise, Impractical Applications of TAZ Metaphysics, Practical Applications of D&D Spells, Starblaster Crew As Family, Taako's Attachment Issues, The Grieving Process is Complicated for Everyone, The Stolen Century, but also romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 06:12:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 14,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12205446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllelaurel/pseuds/mllelaurel
Summary: Love and death, with the odd revolution thrown into the mix, and the bittersweet luxury of a hundred years to sort it all out.





	1. Chapter 1

It takes time for the loss of their world to really hit. One day, everything is fine. The next, Lup finds Barry huddled in the Starblaster’s guts, head in his hands. Her ears twitch, flattening as she picks up the sound of muffled sobs. She stands there for a long moment, like an idiot or an asshole - an isshole, if you will - bereft of pithy words or good ideas. 

The crawlspace is tiny, leaving barely enough room for her to squeeze in next to him, thigh to thigh and arm to arm, half in his lap. Lup can feel him trembling when she takes his hand, pulse bass-thumping under her fingertips. “Well, balls,” he says. “This is embarrassing.” 

There’s a time to throw shade, and this ain’t that time. “What happened?” she asks. 

He shakes his head. “It’s not… I mean, Davenport picked a real loser for his science officer, but that’s kind of set in stone by now.” He cuts himself off, breathing shallow and ragged. 

“It’s okay,” she says. “We’re okay,” and he looks up at her, face suddenly empty.

“Why us?” he asks. _Why did we survive?_ And there’s no good answer. There never will be.

“‘Cause Cap’nport has lousy taste in crew?” she shoots back at him. 

“There were so many people down there. Billions of people, who lived and loved and had jobs they probably didn’t love, and they’re all gone now. Don’t you see it, Lup? They’re all _gone_.” 

“Do you… Your family?” Lup asks hesitantly. She’s lucky. The only family she’s got, the only person she’ll ever need is right on this ship. 

He swallows down another bout of hyperventilation. _Welp. That answers that question._

“Siblings?” Her gut twists. If Taako hadn’t been chosen for the IPRE mission… 

No. Fuck it. If he hadn’t been chosen, she wouldn’t have gone. And maybe then the world would be saved, because she would _eat the fucking Hunger_ to keep it from touching her brother. 

Barry nods. 

“Shit. I’m…” _Don’t say ‘sorry.’_ Sorry is trite; sorry doesn’t help anyone. 

“Three of ‘em.” 

Lup shivers, freezing cold flush against the warm engine. “Fuck.”

“I…” 

“Yeah?”

“I cleaned out my farspeech mail before we blasted off. Figured it was a thing to do. Like doing your laundry. A fresh start, you know? 

Lup bites down on a burst of shitty, inappropriate laughter. At least three fantasy telemarketers have been immortalized forever on her stone of farspeech. She could still win a cruise if she really sets her heart on it. The recycled air they breathe crackles in her chest, and none of this is funny. None of this is funny at all. 

“I can’t remember what their voices sounded like,” Barry says. “Mom left me a voicemail a couple weeks before…” He shakes his head. “ _Before._ We were in a training session, and she must have had crap for reception, I could barely make out what she was saying. I called her back later,” he adds quickly, as though Lup is the sort of person who’d judge him for falling out of touch. “And then I deleted the whole thing. And now I can’t remember. I know what words she’d use, and what she would talk about, but her voice is _gone._ ”

Lup doesn’t miss her own parents. They don’t deserve it and she never knew them besides. But she doesn’t have to feel it to _get_ it. Everyone Barry has ever loved is dead - there’s that word neither of them wants to say out loud. They’re dead, and who will remember them, aside from this man curled up half-broken on the deck with her? 

She leans into his side, head against his shoulder. His breath steadies, ruffling her hair from up above. _Just you keep breathing_ , she thinks, and wills her own heart to quiet down. 

“What were they like?” she asks.

Barry tells her. His mother had been forty-three when Barry was born, her hair already going white, her skin paper-fine in his memory. He had one older sister, with a wife and two kids of her own. Two brothers, one older and one younger. Once the stories start, Barry can’t seem to stop. He tells her of the time his mother had brought a live turkey back home from the market, and how none of them had the heart to kill and eat it, and the time this oldest brother had gotten arrested at an orcs’ rights rally, and the way his baby brother had dropped out of college in his sophomore year. He was just getting back up on his feet, with a welding career in the works. 

Lup aches for him, aches for these people she’ll never get to meet. 

The lights buzz and flicker overhead. Outside, night falls, and Lup forgets she hasn’t let go of Barry’s hand in all this time, until her fingers go numb, and can’t bring herself to mind. 

***

“I need a favor.” 

She catches Lucretia out with her journals at dawn. Lucretia raises one hand in greeting, keeps writing with the other. Her smile is shy and hesitant, but her eyes light up every time one of the others seeks out her company. She’s a good kid, Lup thinks, even if she really needs to get laid in the worst way possible. 

“Of course,” Lucretia says. “If it’s something I can do.”

Lup pulls up a stump next to her. “You conducted interviews with the families of the Starblaster crew, am I right?”

Lucretia nods, flipping absentmindedly to the front of her notebook. “I’m afraid the Institute was unable to track down any of your relatives.”

“That’s ‘cause I haven’t got any.” It’s the truth, or close enough to it, especially with a fake surname on record. “Other than Buttface McGee of course,” she gestures vaguely in Taako’s direction. “But you already know and love him.” 

Lucretia ducks her head. “He’s really quite a character. Both of you are.” 

Lup punches it in. “Weirdo squad, represent! But anyway.”

“Yes, of course.” 

“Do you remember what they all looked like?” Lup asks. 

Lucretia nods. “Having picture-perfect memory comes in handy.” 

“Perfect! Give me a picture.” 

Lucretia winds up doing a full series. Barry’s family, crowding the parchment. Davenport’s old mentor from the Institute of Aeronautics. Merle’s parents, dressed in faded beach gear, his father holding a bible of Pan. A brawny, smiling woman with Magnus’s eyes, dragged along by two giant mastiffs. A stately, dark-skinned couple in austere robes, who must be Lucretia’s own parents. 

Taako’s the hardest. “I wish you could’ve met our aunt,” Lup tells Lucretia. Great-Aunt Claudia had already been ancient when she had two kids foisted upon her. Lup has never been clear which side of the family she came from, and she never knew why Claudia refused to talk about what happened to their parents. She’s just sort of assumed they dumped her and Taako the first chance they got, and ran off to Fantasy Cancun. Except screw that, because Fantasy Cancun sounds pretty sweet. Dipshits don’t deserve Fantasy Cancun. 

Their great-aunt had been pretty great, though. When Lup and Taako speak Elvish, it’s in the cadences of her voice. It’s her recipes Lup tries to replicate, every time she’s down in the dumps. They never come out right. 

Claudia died when they were twelve. She was six-hundred-and-seventy, but hell if that makes it any better. A score of guardians picked up her slack resentfully for the next decade or so, but she was the first and last to actually give a shit. They learned to look out for one another. Whatever the official papers might have said, no one else was going to. 

Lup closes her eyes and tries to recall the spark in the old woman’s silvery eyes, the fine laugh wrinkles around her mouth, the color of her favorite dress, and when she’s done, Lucretia’s portrait almost does her justice. 

“What about you?” Lucretia asks. “Sure, you and Taako can share, but don’t you deserve your own?”

“Gimme Greg Grimauldis from R&D,” Lup tells her. 

Lucretia makes a face. “ _Why?_ ” 

Lup’s grin has teeth in it. “Wanted posters,” she says. Good old Greg. He’s going to owe her thirty dollars now. It’s his toll for going and dying on her. 

***

She leaves Barry’s drawing on his nightstand, the night after they pierce the veil between the worlds again, leaving the Hunger’s devastation behind them. Years and worlds later, he still has it, laminated and stored in his emergency pack. 

Sometimes, when Barry’s asleep, Lup takes it out. She looks at the drawing long and hard, studying all the faces, and thinks, _just hang on. We’ll get you all back._

_Anything less is not an option._


	2. Chapter 2

Lup dreams of a metal woman waiting for an endless fiery dawn, and wakes still heavy with uncertainty and grief. There’s a reason most elves don’t sleep very often. Dreams are vivid, kicking up memory like a pile of leaves, and refusing to let it settle. She lies in her bunk, unwilling to move. Today’s the day they land the Starblaster, break up into teams, start searching. Time to meet new people and try not to think about what they might look like torn into pieces by the Hunger’s monstrosities. 

Time to see if they will keep the promise they’ve all made to one another, only hours ago. 

And here’s the thing. Lup believes in them. Believes in the compassion and determination in every single member of the IPRE expedition. She has seen Magnus curl his entire body around an undersized hyena to shield it from the rain of devastation. She has seen Merle clasping the hands of his congregation in Fungston, voice rumbly and gentle. She has seen quiet Lucretia haul a man twice her size down to her level and stare him down, eyes icy-cold, till he broke and ran, then gather the child he’d been beating into her arms. She has seen Davenport in the middle of a makeshift hospital, barking orders and dressing the wounds of perfect strangers while sirens wailed overhead. Even Taako, who needs people like he needs breathing but likes them about as much as he likes a visit to the dentist - even Taako will fail his saving throw when a little girl asks him how to make brownies, or a toddler reaches up, grasping at his braid with chubby hands. 

How the fuck could these people, these brilliant, wonderful people, have even considered what they were considering, down there in the catacombs? 

Barry’s lucky he missed it, staying with the ship while the rest of them argued the pros and cons of motherfucking genocide. He gets to keep an innocence the rest of them have all lost, and Lup gets to keep trusting him without having to rely on love and faith to get her through. 

She’s not being fair. She _knows_ she’s not being fair. Merle had switched over to her side relatively early on. Lucretia had stayed neutral, or at least silent. But they were _there_ , and so they are stained with the same ugly brush as all the others, and right now, Lup needs something simple.

She finds Barry running some kind of scan on the civilization crystal. So much for simple. 

“How are your hands?” she asks. The pinprick marks from the robot’s zappy wiring are all gone, healed up the moment they all rethreaded, but it’s an icebreaker. It doesn’t have to make sense. 

Barry smiles and wiggles his fingers up at her. “Good as new!” Up close, she can see a wire-thin scar on the pad of his left thumb, old enough the bond engine will never undo it. He’s got soft hands, pen calluses on his pointer and index fingers. Gone is the angry red burn from the acid splash on their seventh cycle, and the tetanus swelling that had killed him midway through the eleventh. “How about you? You, uh, look good. All healed up, right?”

Lup looks like warmed up shit, if warmed up shit was capable of casting ‘Disguise Self,’ but why quibble? “Good as new,” she echoes back at him. “You want some help with that?” She gestures at the crystal. Might as well dive right in, if she can’t avoid. 

Barry nods. “I want to make sure everyone’s stable in there. Which, uh… which is a bit nerve-wracking, since I can’t communicate with them.” Their robot bodies are all gone, molded to the Hunger’s bidding, and bodiless souls cannot speak. Not in a way the living will understand. 

And then there’s the part they hadn’t discussed. Living, sapient beings cannot come with them. That much has been established. These people are sapient as _fuck_ , and whether they’re living or dead is an argument for the philosophers among them. The crystal is still here, like all items gathered in their repeating journey, a Fantasy Schrodinger’s Catbox held in Barry’s hands. 

“I don’t suppose you know how to build a robot and house a soul in it?” Lup suggests. 

“Honestly?” Barry scratches the back of his neck. “That second part, I could probably do. The problem’s in materials and interfacing. I don’t…” He clears his throat. “I really wouldn’t want to fuck this up. These are people. One wrong move, and I could kill someone. They’d be gone for good.”

“You think we’ll find another world like the one they came from?” It wouldn’t be their homeworld, but who’s to say the people in that crystal couldn’t make a home there, with a high enough technology level for new bodies and a new start. _Just as long as we get the Light and get the fuck out, so that their new home doesn’t get vored like the old one._

“It’s probably out there somewhere,” Barry says. “Just, you know, statistically speaking. Whether we find it… I think that’s up to the bond engine. Or maybe pure luck. I don’t think even R&D would know for sure.” 

“In other words, we have a better chance of defeating the Hunger and bringing everyone back.” At least her plan gives them some thin sliver of agency, instead of leaving it all to fate. 

Barry frowns. “Talk to me a little more about this hypothesis. Because if there’s anything we can _do_ , to make sure it happens, I’d really like to… to make it happen.”

“Okay, so first of all,” Lup ticks the points off on her fingers, “We know the remnants of the worlds it consumes are still there within the Hunger.” That was the crux of the earlier argument. 

“Second of all, we’ve fought those remnants. We know they fight the way they did, or would or might have, back when they were alive. Which suggests the Hunger has absorbed at least some of their memories along with their bodies.” ‘Absorbed’ may have been a poor choice of words, in immediate retrospect. Absorbed is digested, is broken down into component parts. Digested food becomes something else, nourishing the consumer. There’s no way to restore it. 

“What about their personalities?” Barry asks. “What about their souls?” He holds up his hands, placating. “I’m not arguing with you, Lup. I just want to cover all the bases.”

She nods. “I know. The Hunger consumes the astral plane along with all the others, when it destroys a planar system. Hell if I know what _that_ means. Look, I’m an Evoker. There’s lots of stuff I don’t suck at, but my real sweet spot’s blowing shit up, okay? Souls are Necro-department.”

“It’s advanced stuff even for a Necromancer,” Barry says. 

“Yeah, but that’s only because all Necromancers are pimply-assed losers.” Which is to say she is a hundo percent out of her comfort zone, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

Barry flips her off half-heartedly. “Let me know when you’re ready to admit my field is awesome. I’ll give you a crash course. We’ll raise some zombies.” 

“I _feel_ like a zombie.” Lup sighs, raking her hands through her hair. This was supposed to help the migraine she woke up with, but it’s only making it worse. If she’s lucky, Merle has a full stash of those analgesic herbs from cycle nine. He’s been trying to grow them hydroponically. His room smells like green, whenever she sticks her head in. 

“Look,” she says. “I don’t fucking know, I just…” 

It’s just that she hates how helpless this makes her feel. Year after year of landing and searching and running, and rinse and repeat. Triage and palliatives at the very best, and yeah, sure there are worlds they honest-to-gods saved, but it’s hard hanging onto that, every time they fail.

Barry puts down the crystal, and holds a hand out to her. She takes it before he can pull back again. 

“Barold?”

“Yeah?” It’s not even his real name. Just something she and Taako have taken to calling him, but he responds to it anyway.

“I want a hug.” 

He holds out his other arm and she steps closer. Arms around his middle, chin atop his head. She’s six inches taller than him and it’s perfect. His hair is messy and soft. The cheap soap he uses has no scent, even to Lup’s sharp nose, and he’s a little stiff, like he doesn’t know where to put his hands without offending her. _What a dum-dum_ , she thinks affectionately. 

“Hug harder,” she grumbles into his hairline. “You’re not going to squish me.” 

Barry’s hands settle somewhere just below her shoulder blades, warm and steady, pressing down just a little. 

Lup wonders whether he’d go for it if she asked for a backrub, or if that’s pushing things a little too far. Her back aches and twinges, tight with all the stress, and she is so, so tempted. _I bet he’d be good at it_ , and that’s a dangerous thought, leading down a primrose path of what else he might be good at. 

She doesn’t blush easily, but she’s blushing now, glad there’s no way he can see her face. 

“You alright?” Barry asks, and it’s a complicated question. None of them will ever be alright again, probably. But…

“Doing better now,” she says, and it’s not a lie.


	3. Chapter 3

The fire crackles, popping sparks into the air. The sound and warmth of it makes Lup’s skin hum, sets her toes to tapping. She is restless and happy, and the night is young, carefree for a change. Lup’s nose prickles with the scent of toasting spices, cumin and coriander hovering right on the edge between perfection and charcoal. Meat roasting away in some kind of kiln Taako had jury-rigged, and the sound of Taako swearing under his breath, because dang it, food never turns out right unless you yell at it first. 

No one knows where Magnus had dug up the harmonica, or where he had learned to play, but there’s a raw kind of beauty in its reedy song. It’s the kind of music you could let yourself cry to, if you were the crying kind. And if you don’t cry, well, then you’ve got to dance. 

Dragging Merle up onto his feet with her is a good start. Every party needs a dwarf who knows how to boogie, and if anyone can bully Davenport into having a good time, it’s got to be Merle fucking Highchurch. It snowballs from there, until Barry’s the only one hanging back. 

Lup sidles up to him. “Whassamatter, my man? Not feeling the groove?”

Barry shrugs. His face looks naked in the firelight, and not in a pretentious metaphor sort of way, either. 

“What happened to your glasses?”

Barry scratches the back of his head, sheepish. “Remember that fight Magnus and I got into?”

“The bugbear?”

He nods. 

Lup bursts out laughing. “So now I’m imagining a fucking bugbear sporting your fantasy coke bottles, Barr-o. Is that how it went? Did it steal your glasses like a great big bully?” 

“Yep,” he says flatly. “Very funny. My life’s a bucket of yuks.” 

Lup ruffles his hair before she can stop herself. “It’s pretty funny, admit it.”

Barry sighs. “The part where I tripped over a rock and broke ‘em while casting a spell is fucking hilarious.” His nose and left cheek look pretty bruised, now that she’s looking. “And now I can’t see shit-all for the next…” He does some mental math. “Three weeks, probably.” It’s a sobering thought. Almost time to go. “At least they’ll reform when we reset.” All of their original clothes and accessories do, even if their supplies don’t. Which is a good thing - a very, very good thing, in Barry’s case. 

“Have you tried Mending them?”

“Crushed lens. Gets kind of hard to find that many small pieces when you can’t focus for beans.” Barry rubs his eyes, grimacing.

“Migraine?” Lup asks. 

“Or close enough. I should see if Merle’s got something for it.” 

“How about I kiss it and make it better instead?” One of these days, Lup’s brain and her mouth are gonna have a chat about who’s boss. Today is not that day. 

Barry flushes. At least he has the heat from the bonfire for an excuse. Lup leans in, closing the distance between them before she can think better of it. Her lips brush over the spot right between his eyes, leaving behind a smudge of carmine lipstick. She’s run out of the good, smear-free stuff years ago. “There,” she says. “All better.” 

Barry’s hand drifts to his face, touching the spot she had kissed, almost in a daze. “You know, that actually does help. Thank you.” 

“My pleasure, babe. Hey,” she takes his hand. “Do you trust me?”

“A little, uh, a little suspicious when you put it like that, but,” his voice grows serious. “Yeah, I do. Of course I do.”

“Then come dance.”

“I’m going to trip over something.” 

Lup tugs him to his feet. “Just keep your eyes on me. I won’t let you fall.” She drapes her arms around his neck, and he goes with her, hands resting on her hips. She expects him to shuffle, and is surprised to find a rhythm and grace in the way he moves to the music. 

Then the music changes, and Barry closes his eyes, and Lup gasps as he takes the lead, twirling her around expertly. Firelight blurs around the edges of her night vision, and she laughs, giddy and unexpected. Every brush of his hands, every bump of his ankle against hers seems to leave a trail, white-hot like the bonds of light sparking in the Starblaster’s engines. 

“Weren’t you scared you were going to trip?” she teases him afterward.

“You said you wouldn’t let me,” Barry replies, and maybe it really is that simple. 

***

Another time and another world, Barry’s glasses come tumbling off his face and onto the sand. Lup bends to scoop them up, places them carefully back atop his nose, savors the heat of his blush. She’s teasing him very deliberately as she drags her fingertips along his cheek to the curve of his chin, but she’s teasing herself more than anyone else. 

“Lup, I…”

_This is it_ , she thinks. _This has to be it._

His mouth moves, shaping words, but no sound comes out. “Shit. Let’s try that again.”

“Take your time, Barold.” 

Lup has no idea why he cracks up laughing at that, bent in half and wheezing as he slides to the ground. 

“You okay in there?” 

He wipes his eyes, letting out another chuckle. “Just… you and Taako, both… I guess you really are twins.” 

“Wow. You just noticed.” She plops down on the sand next to him.

Barry rakes both hands through his hair. “Damn it. Now I can’t say what I was going to say, because it’s going to sound like I’m hitting on your brother, because _context._ Context just made this weird. ...Or actually, no. The opposite of context. Sentence proximity. I’m going to stop saying words.” 

“Are you hitting on _me_ , Barold?” She leans forward, until their noses are almost touching. 

“I love you,” he says, and it’s like an arrow through her heart, but not one of those wussy cupid arrows, more like an actual arrow, with barbs. The kind that lodges in your skin and goes right between your ribs. The kind you need to defletch and shove through, because there’s no pulling it out the regular way. 

“Fuck,” Lup finally says, which really isn’t the best executive summary she could have come up with. 

“I… just made it awkward, didn’t I?”

She could answer that, or she could kiss him. Their noses bump along the way, and his mouth widens into a grin right before she covers it with hers.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Told ya the rating would go up. 
> 
> See end notes for a slight warning.

It’s been a good day. Clear and hot, like all the days here on this world. Lup’s tan has never looked better. She wriggles her toes in the surf, watching for Magnus out the corner of her eye. She got sand in her mouth last time he tackled her, and he is going to fucking pay next time she sees him. 

Out in the distance, two figures paddle toward the shore. Lup waves them over, grinning and dodging when Taako tries to splash her. “Eat shit, I’m a ninja!” 

The next splash drenches her head to toe, because Barry Bluejeans is a fucking sneaky traitor asking to get dunked on. Lup wades in and retaliates with extreme prejudice. He comes spluttering back up, only a few feet away from her, and suddenly the joke’s on Lup as her ears fill with static and the sound of her own heartbeat.

There is a single white streak on Barry’s nose, the only part of him still miraculously un-sunburned. His hair is slicked back and he squints myopically in the sunlight, glasses lying somewhere back on the shore.

He’s beautiful. 

Even dry, he’s always been a man of soft edges. Here in the water, he looks softer still, and Lup can’t even describe how much she wants to touch him. 

Taako catches her eye over Barry’s shoulder, one of those whole-conversation looks it takes over a century and maybe sharing a womb to cultivate. He flashes her a thumbs-up, muttering something under his breath, and Lup feels the familiar tingle of magic shifting beneath her skin. 

Best brother ever. Still not allowed to steal her shampoo. 

She drapes an arm over Barry’s shoulder, all casual-like. “Hey, Barold? Wanna blow this popsicle stand?” 

Barry blinks at her.

She tilts up his chin, rubbing her knuckles against the scruff of his five-o’-clock shadow. “What do you _think_ I’m saying, handsome?” Days of walking along the beach holding hands ain’t exactly Lup’s style, and that’s all they’ve been doing so far. It’s been… nice. Surprisingly nice, but she wants more, is going to keep wanting more and more, the longer she’s around this man. 

Somewhere off to the side, Taako snickers. “Ugh, you two are gross. Taako out.” A whoosh of displaced air, and he’s Blinked away. 

Barry nods. “Yeah, think I’m starting to catch your drift. And… yeah.” 

She drags him inside. The shelter’s sturdy and private (she doesn’t care much, but Barry probably would,) and most importantly, it’s got floors. Sand in the asscrack is so not her kink. They’d hauled in the mattress pads off the Starblaster bunks, lining them up all along the enclosure. Barry makes the best and stupidest noise when she topples him over onto one. “You good, my man?” She taps a single French-manicured finger over his lower lip. 

His adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard. “S-so good. I… Yeah, better than.” 

It takes a little work to wiggle out of a wet swimsuit, but the way his eyes go wide is nothing if not gratifying.

“You staring at my tits, Bluejeans?”

“Is that okay?”

She rolls her eyes. “‘s what they’re there for, nerd.” 

His mouth quirks up. “Just to look at?”

Well, if he wants to play _that_ game… “What if I said yes?” and she drapes herself over him, pinning his wrists down at his sides. It’s a toss-up, whether he could break her hold, but this isn’t that kind of power struggle anyway. 

“Then I’d say ‘yes, ma’am.’”

Lup makes a face. “Ugh. Don’t call me ma’am. I’m only a hundred and seventy.” 

“Miss? Honorable Doctor of Arcane Sciences? Princess Fifi?” She takes the opportunity to stick her hand down his shorts, and his voice cracks. “L-lup!”

“Better.” She nuzzles the line of his jaw, brushes her lips over the corner of his mouth. “Hey. I’m gonna kiss you, okay?” she asks needlessly, and why is it a kiss that leaves her aching, open and vulnerable when they’re already most of the way to naked. 

He’s a good kisser, clumsy and earnest, and all those other things she’d never have called ‘good’ before. She manages to get his shorts off, without ripping them too much, and then they’re skin to skin, and she straddles him, feeling his dick hard against her thigh. 

“Wait a second.” Barry’s voice is quiet, and urgent enough to make her pause immediately. “Are you sure you… I mean, we don’t, um, have anything…” Looks like he didn’t bring condoms on a space expedition either. _You’d think they’d include that on a little checklist for what to pack. ‘Open in case of apocalypse.’_

She gives him a wan smile. “‘s not exactly a risk, babe.” Any STIs they might have had would have been caught and treated during the pre-mission medical exams, and as for pregnancy. Well. That just ain’t how Transmutation works, and if there’s bitterness in that, she hopes she’s good enough at hiding it. 

A little Prestidigitation afterwards to clean up the mess, and there you have it. No need to worry at all. 

“Gotcha.” Barry strokes her face, and Lup has to kiss him again as she curls her hand around his dick, positioning him where she needs him. 

He groans right in Lup’s ear as he presses inside her, the sound reverberating all the way down to her toes. She rides him hard and fast, not bothering to pause or give herself time to adjust, squeezing down around him deliberately just to feel him shudder. His fingers are just the right bit of rough on her clit, and he looks hilariously pleased when she bucks and swears. He snort-laughs when her ear-tip flicks against his face, almost breaking their rhythm, and Lup’s pretty sure she can get high off of this. Bottle and sell it, because there’s no better feeling in the world. 

“Holy fuck,” Barry says afterwards, still trying to catch his breath as Lup snags someone’s shirt and pants off the floor. Going by the size, they might belong to Magnus. She’d like to bask a little bit more, but the True Polymorph’s wearing off, and she’d prefer to be dressed again before that happens. Transmutation’s great, but it’s also finite, spells never lasting longer than an hour, less without the caster’s concentration. And it’s not like she’s ashamed of her body. She just doesn’t need anyone else’s shit, not ever but especially not now. 

Barry shoots her a worried look, then scoots over so that she can curl up next to him again. Close as he is, with his arm draped loosely over her waist, there’s no way he wouldn’t feel her body shifting back, underneath Magnus’s oversized button-down. _Moment of truth,_ Lup thinks, and normally this is the perfect time to bail, but… 

But what? Lup has no idea how to finish that sentence, even inside her head. She shuts her eyes and breathes, and eventually feels him pull her closer. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself, nerd,” she mumbles into his chest. He smells like sea and sweat and warm, sunburned skin. 

“That was amazing,” Barry says. 

“Yeah, maybe that’s ‘cause I’ve, I don’t know, _done this before._ ” She sticks her tongue out at him, wiggling it suggestively. 

“I have no idea what you’re trying to imply here,” he deadpans. His hands card rhythmically through her hair, working out the tangles. His heart beats quietly against the palm of her hand. “Was it okay? For you, I mean.” 

“You’re fishing for compliments,” she says, before something sappy can come out of her mouth. 

He shrugs. “So, are the compliments biting or what?” 

“Fuck yeah, it was great!” Lup elbows him, grinning. “We kick ass in bed. In fact, we just kicked this bed’s ass. It’s dead now, time to loot its corpse.” 

Barry laughs. “The fuck, Lup?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. That one got away from me. So, uh,” she bites her lower lip. “We can do this again right?”

“Anytime, as often as you like,” Barry says, and his smile liquifies something inside her chest. 

“Careful how you phrase that, bucko.” She could wear him out in no time, with a good-faith effort. She’d sort of like to try. 

He considers. “Anytime not in front of the others?”

“Deal.” She stretches out, popping her shoulder joints. Everything feels better after sex. She’d learned as much almost a hundred years ago, long before Barry was even born. Lup wonders why she’s thinking of it now, that man she’d picked up in a bar the night she and Taako finally worked the bugs out of the transformation spell. She remembers the thrill of it, of taking what she wanted and of being wanted in return, the dim light refracting in the glasses behind the counter, the sweat cooling between her shoulder blades afterwards, leaving a shivery disquiet she could never quite name. 

And this? This is like that, but different. Everything looks softer after the fact, from the too-small bed they are sharing to the warmth in Barry’s eyes. Lying here now, she doesn’t feel cold at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter (and the next one) do touch on the subject of body dysphoria. Lightly enough, I hope, but I figured it's worth mentioning here.


	5. Chapter 5

Lup’s life rests on very few constants. Places and people and the feel of gold jingling in your pocket, all of those things are transient. You can always go elsewhere. You can always do without. 

But there are a few. First, there will always be her power, rigorous training and raw, simmering talent, and the knowledge that there ain’t a situation she can’t blast her way out of. Then there’s luck. Pure, dumb luck that’s gotten her through almost two hundred years.

And there’s Taako, the one true constant. Her partner in just about any kind of crime. The other half of her heart, if she feels like being sappy that day. He’s a good constant, an easy constant, the kind of constant who has somehow managed not to die in forty-five years of running from the Hunger. 

Some constants can’t stay constant forever. 

When he dies, it isn’t dramatic. He’s not in the middle of a zingy one-liner, and she’s not laughing, believing they’ll all be okay. He doesn’t take a hit meant for somebody else, heroic at last after years of self-preservation. No, what kills him is simple, brutal attrition. Hit after hit, too many for Merle to heal or Magnus to parry. 

Lup’s down to her own last dregs when he falls, seconds from blacking out, and she casts one last Fireball, and doesn’t realize that her brother is gone. 

She always thought she would know. No matter how far apart they might be, she would _know._

(Taako has never told her what it feels like, when she dies for a cycle. She’s asked; he’s deflected.)

And it’s fine, he’s not really gone, he’ll be back next year. 

It’s just a year.

(His body’s a battlefield of scorch marks, his hair a wild mess, and she has to look away before she sees any more.)

“The enemy had zeroed in on the greatest threat,” Davenport tells her. It had been extra susceptible to magical attacks. She and Taako had both pressed the advantage. 

He didn’t die because he was weak, he died because he stood out. Lup thought they’d learned that lesson years ago.

(They learned it and ignored it. When have they ever been anything less than exceptional?)

She’s on her knees, and the inside of her throat stings like it’s been sliced open with a million tiny blades. Someone pulls her to her feet, pulls her back, pulls her away. 

_It should have been me,_ she thinks. _It could have been either of us. It should have been me._

(Dying hurts, but then it’s all over. She’s died nine deaths by now, and didn’t let any of them get to her. If she’s dead, it’s not her problem any more. The survivors are the ones who have it rough.) 

He’ll be back, this is fine, she’ll be fine. 

It’s later. Someone puts food in front of her. She eats it, and it’s fine, and it doesn’t taste like anything.

It’s been a month. She cuts herself while chopping vegetables, and it feels like nothing, and there are tears welling up in her eyes, dripping salty into the cut, and all she can see are Taako’s hands over the same chopping board, a dragon’s hoard of rings lying off to the side. 

There’s an oil splash burn on the inside of his left wrist, nicks all over his fingers. He never takes down the illusion disguising those scars, earned working the line in kitchen after kitchen, but neither has he allowed them to be wiped away. They are badges of honor, as much as his beauty, and he’s just as proud of them in his roundabout Taako way. 

This is Taako’s kitchen. Lup was never meant to stand alone in it. 

Barry takes the knife from her and sets it aside. She feels cold water running over her cut, the tightening of bandages, and she’s still crying, can’t stop crying, even if it makes her the biggest idiot this plane has ever seen. 

“I miss him too,” Barry says quietly. 

“It’s not like he’s actually fucking dead!” Lup doesn’t mean to shout, but she does. The words echo inside the Starblaster’s hull. “Fuck. Shit. Sorry.” 

“‘ s all good.” 

“Is it?” He didn’t flinch when she yelled, but Lup remembers the sudden rigidity in his shoulders. He’d made the _choice_ not to flinch. “Never mind. That’s a vague-ass landmine of a question.”

She feels the curve of Barry’s chin resting on her shoulder. “Talk to me,” he says. No ‘it’s okay,’ because nothing is; no ‘we’re okay,’ because how could they be? Not even ‘we’ll be okay,’ because right now the future is godsdamn unfathomable. And there is Barry. Seeing the landmine and stepping right over it. 

“I’ve just never… He’s never… It’s always been two of us.” All the words come out wrong. Without Taako there by her side, _she_ is wrong, only half of herself left to face the world. 

_’We’ll get them back,’_ she had told Barry once. Now she sees how useless a promise that was. Even if they do, it won’t ever make up for the missing, lonely years. 

“What can I do?” he asks. “How can I-?” He knows he can’t make it better, but he won’t be Barry of he didn’t try anyway. 

“Stay with me,” she says, and it cracks her voice, nearly cracks _her_ in two. 

Barry kisses the back of her head, and Lup turns around in his arms, ‘til she’s facing him. Kisses the tip of his nose, his cheek, his forehead. 

And she can’t stop kissing him once she starts, because he’s there, and he’s alive, and he’s Barry, and _gods_ she doesn’t know what she would do if she lost him as well. 

“I...” Barry trails off. Takes her hand in both of his and brushes his lips against her bandaged knuckles. 

Lup buries her face in his chest. “I’m dripping on you,” she says after a moment. 

Barry looks down at the damp patch on his shirt. At least some of that is snot, probably. “Eh,” he says. “It’s seen worse.”

“Yuck,” she says, and backs into the counter, pulling him along with her. It’s been over a month since she’s felt anything beyond a sick, hollow heat pooling inside her chest, and all at once she is drunk on feeling, this dizzying cross of heartache and desire. The pulse in his throat flickers against the tip of her tongue, and he makes a low, desperate noise when she bites down. She slides her hands under the hem of his shirt, dragging her fingernails over his stomach. 

“Probably not in the kitchen?” Barry says, when she goes to pull the shirt over his head. 

Lup wrinkles her nose. “Okay, yeah. Jizz near food equals bad idea.” 

Barry chokes. 

“What? You know who you hooked up with. I am one classy broad, you best believe.” Her eyes are puffy and her nose feels like it’s been punched in, and Barry looks right past that, to the red-hot babe she is under most circumstances. 

“This is totally the part where I sweep you off your feet and carry you away,” he says. “Except in real life, that would probably be the part where I drop you.” 

Lup squeezes his bicep. “Keep working on it, sweetie, you’ll get there.” He has before. Shame the reset undoes all the hard work, every time. 

“In the meantime we walk?”

Lup takes his hand. “Like the boring old farts we are.” 

***

Barry’s bedroom is a mess. Piles of books in a cacophony of languages, many no longer spoken by anyone outside this ship, an empty coffee mug tipped over onto a stack of papers, t-shirts with screen-printed college logos, worn down into softness. It looks nothing like the room Lup shares with Taako, and right now that’s the best of all possible worlds. 

She perches on the corner of the bed, gathers her thoughts to cast Alter Self, and that’s when everything goes wrong again. 

_”Fuck yeah!” Taako pumps his fist into the air. “Guess what spell doesn’t need material components? This spell, that’s what. Suck my balls, overpriced lizard skin vendors!”_

_He leans over where Lup is sitting and pokes her in the chest. “You ready to try this?”_

Lup dry-heaves, hands over her mouth, mind gone searing-hot-blank.

There’s another dip in the mattress as Barry sits next to her. His hand hovers in midair, halfway between reaching for her and keeping his distance. 

“I can’t do this.” She’s shaking, fingertips gone numb as she pulls her knees up to her chest. 

“Then you don’t have to. Hey,” Barry peers into her face. “We don’t have to do anything if you’re not feeling it.”

“That’s not…” Lup sniffs, fishes around for a fantasy Kleenex, winds up wiping her face with a corner of the sheet.“I didn’t mean like that. I just…” Words hurt. Putting it into words hurts, but she’s got to do it anyway. “It’s one of Taako’s spells,” she finally says. “He learned it first, and then I picked it up from him.” 

Realization dawns on Barry’s face.

“I still want you,” Lup blurts out, and she can’t tell if ‘want’ is the right word for it, when it’s something more like ‘need;’ when the thought of putting on the brakes makes her stomach twist. Her fingernails dig half-moons into her palms, and Barry’s leg is warm against her cheek, even through the denim of his jeans, as she slides down into his lap. “It’s just the fucking spell.” 

“Then,” Barry suggests, “maybe we could leave it out.” He rests a hand on her forehead. “Would that be alright?” 

For a moment, Lup isn’t sure what he’s saying. 

“You always cast Alter Self, before we um..”

“Fuck?” Lup interjects. Not that the stammering isn’t cute, but so’s getting to the point. 

“Yes, that. And don’t get me wrong. You are- holy shit, you knock me the hell out every time I see you naked. But the thing is, you knock me the hell out every time I see you, _period_. I’m not even hyperbolizing. There goes all the air in the room and I can’t breathe, because you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Okay,” Lup says. “You’re right, you’re totally not hyperbolizing.” 

“And I didn’t want to say anything, because...” He glances nervously at her before proceeding. “You gotta do you, and…” The expression on his face is very serious. “I never want to ask you to do something you’re uncomfortable with. But the offer’s on the table.” 

It’s kind of a lot to process all at once. “That’s what you really want?” 

“If that’s what you-”

Lup holds up her hand. “Yeah, no, we are _not_ doing the ‘if you want,’ ‘no, if _you_ want’ thing.”

“Okay. So tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know,” Lup admits. She can feel the heat rising in her cheeks. “It’s all uncharted cherry territory, babe.” No one’s asked before and shit, she wasn’t gonna _offer._ “And maybe we get undressed and I realize it wigs the hell out of me.”

“Then we stop.” 

“Simple as that?”

“Seems pretty straightforward to me.” 

A part of Lup wants to think it over. The rest of her imagines another several days alone with her brain and vetoes the think bill _hard_. “Let’s try it,” she says. 

***

He takes his time relearning her body, unbuttoning her blouse and tossing it aside as she skims out of her pants and underwear, nipping at the spot between her ear and throat which always makes her howl. His fingers find one nipple, pinching and twisting just the way she likes, while his mouth closes over the other, and her back arches off the bed. 

“Huh,” he says, pulling up. “Guess those are still sensitive.”

Lup buries her hands in his hair and yanks him back down. He comes all-too-willingly, running his hands along her sides. 

“Barry, if you tickle me, so help me, I will-!” 

Her throat dries up as he shifts til he’s between her thighs, close enough she can feel the warmth of his breath. And pauses. And she refuses - she refuses to let herself believe this is where he backs down. Still, he pauses, eyes narrowed in concentration, studying her like she’s a particularly juicy puzzle. Lup’s heart jolts inside her chest, fit to rearrange her ribs. 

“Are you fucking- You’re seriously analyzing the ergonomics of my junk, right now?”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve ever come at it from this angle before.” She can see the flush spread down from his neck and past his collarbones.

“Shyeaah, no way you’re flexible enough to suck your own dick, nerdface.” 

“I’ve got three words for you. Mage Hand derivative.” 

“And there go your fucking spell slots. Also I call bullshit. Hah! Two points to Lup. Lup wins!” 

He smiles up at her, crooked and sweet. “Kind of think I’m the one winning here, actually,” and with that, he lowers his head, one hot cheek resting against her thigh. 

Boy’s always been good with his tongue. Always a fast learner. His mouth is hot and wet, and Lup would seriously prefer not to white out right now from how good it feels. 

And he stops. 

“Still okay?”

“Barold, I am going to _kill_ you!” No way he ain’t doing this to fuck with her. 

“Doubt it,” he says, and Lup seriously considers pulling his hair, bad manners be damned. 

“You’re an asshol-” He goes down again, cutting her off mid-insult, and for a moment, the world tilts right-side-up again, and nothing hurts. 

***

“I love you too,” he says, and Lup realizes she must have said it first. She freezes in place, waiting for the fear to hit her, and it never does, and she keeps waiting, and it never does, and when he touches her mouth, she realizes she must be smiling.


	6. Chapter 6

They are threads of light with song and story thundering in their ears, and all Lup can see is Taako, alive again and yammering about Paul Blart the Third. Did Taako date some guy named Paul Blart back in University? Fuck if Lup can remember. He was probably an asshole anyway. 

With a wordless cry, Lup tackles her twin, sending them both sprawling on the deck. 

“Ow,” Taako says. “If I hit my head and die again, I’m blaming you.” He’s grinning, arms wrapped tight around her, ears forward. 

Lup sits on him triumphantly, keeping him pinned. “Congrats on finally gacking it, goofus. I’ll make you a medal or some shit.” 

“It better not fucking clash with my wardrobe.”

“Oh, I’ll make _sure_ it fucking clashes.” She pulls him up with her into a sitting position, presses her ear against his heartbeat.

He kisses the part in her hair. “I missed you too, Lulu.”

“No you didn’t. You were too dead to care.”

“Well, I would have. Death, it turns out, is boring as _fuck_. I don’t even remember how it went. The least it could do is put me up in Hottie Hotel for the duration. Spa, margaritas, half-naked dudes obeying my every whim.” He points his finger up toward the ceiling. “Someone up there better be taking notes.” 

Lup smiles through totally-nonexistent tears. “Maybe they already are and you just don’t remember.” 

He huffs. “Ch’yeah, what a ripoff. Okay, gedoffa me, you’re…” He wrinkles his nose. “Did you lose weight? You lost weight, what the fuck!”

Lup shrugs. 

“Don’t you shrug at me, you fucking disaster. I haven’t eaten anything in ten months and I’m fine. What’s your excuse?” He extricates himself from her clutches, pushing up onto his feet. “Barold?” 

He’s about to lay into Barry for not taking better care of her. Lup can tell by the look on his face. By the look on _his_ face so can Barry. 

“How much of her shit did you have to put up with while I was out?” Taako slings an arm over Barry’s shoulders, and maybe, Lup thinks, just maybe he’s still capable of surprising her, after all these years. “Soooo much shit, am I right?” 

Barry gives him a look which can only be described as ‘I know what you did last summer.’ “As compared to how much of _your_ shit I put up with a few years ago?” And doesn’t that sound about right, Lup thinks. Her boy Taako projects so much he shoulda majored in Illusion. She is selfishly, guiltily glad for the confirmation that Barry must have been there for him, all those times when she was gone. 

“Ugh.” Taako slumps. “You’re no fun. Lucretia, babe, come rescue me from these dour-ass puritans.”

“Yeah, no staying right the fuck out of this one,” says Lucretia. She’s officially Lup’s favorite now. 

***

The Legato Conservatory isn’t home, but Lup loves it almost enough to pretend. The windows of her dormitory room open up into the warm summer night, curtains billowing. She can hear Taako’s voice drifting up from the veranda below. Taako has colonized the porch swing, in easy view from her window, and deigned to let Barry join him, “Okay, okay, try this on for size, Bluejeans: ‘in this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.’”

“Fantasy Benjamin Franklin,” Barry replies without missing a beat. 

“It’s Fantasy Taako now.”

“Do they even have taxes on this world?”

“Fuck if I know. Ch’boy hasn’t paid his taxes in fifty years.” 

Barry pauses. “That’s ten more years than we’ve been on the run.” 

Taako waves him away. “Don’t trouble genius with math.” He ‘hmmm’s. “You might have something there, though. Local mood lighting’s not right for that one, if you know what I mean. How about… ‘Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ Fantasy Epicurus. Suck on _that_.”

“I’m sensing a theme,” Barry comments. 

“Taxes?” Taako gesticulates wildly with the wine bottle in his hand. Half-empty judging by the heft of it, Lup thinks. 

“Taako.” Barry takes the bottle from him. Takes a pull of his own as Taako protests. 

“Great,” Taako says. “Now I’m gonna get your gross science germs if I want to get any more drank.” 

“You have two fucking PhDs.”

“Yeah, in interesting and dynamic subjects-not-for-nerds.” 

“You’re never getting this wine back, you know. It’s mine forever now. Also you’re shitfaced.” 

Taako makes another half-hearted grab, slouching against Barry’s shoulder. “So, drunk question, fair warning-” He holds up a hand before Barry can protest. “Not hitting on you, Barold, eww.”

“Thanks? I think?”

“Drunk question.” Taako’s ears lie flat against his head. “You think the Hunger gets our bodies, if we die on a world that gets eaten? Because I totes left a body on that world. Hey,” he hiccups. “D’you think that means there’s two of me now. Does it mean there are like fucking fifteen of Mags? That is too many Mango, too powerful. What if they teamed up?”

Barry rubs the back of his head. “Okay, to get into your first question, which I’m pretty sure is the real question… Empirical evidence suggests it does not. Get us, I mean. Otherwise we would have faced ourselves in battle already. We know there’s a sentience within the Hunger.” Merle’s recurring deaths are testament to that. “I sincerely doubt it would pass up the chance to mess with us that way, if it could. Besides. Technically, it consumes the Light of Creation on worlds where we fail to find it. And yet the light escapes. It revives and travels with us when we cross the planar barrier.”

_Maybe it all comes down to souls_ , Lup finds herself thinking once again. _You can take my life, you can grind me down to bone dust, but you cannot ever take the essence of me_. 

“In your case, you could argue you died too early for the Hunger to make any use of your remains.” From above, Lup can see Barry shudder. “However, Magnus died at the very end on our first world, and we haven’t seen him show up yet.”

Taako tips back his head. “Heheh. Y’all’d be so fucked if you had to fight me. Bitch, you know it.” 

“It wouldn’t be great for morale.”

“It wouldn’t be great for your _hide_. Morale, shit. You sound like Cap’nport.” Taako tries to sit up, only to find himself caught, one dangly earring tangled in the collar of Barry’s robe. 

Barry freezes. “Hold still.” Carefully, he picks the beaded crystals out from between the rough-woven cotton. 

“Be easier if I just took it out first,” Taako protests, just as Barry finally succeeds in freeing him. “...Never mind.” He doesn’t bother lifting his head, and Barry doesn’t bother lifting his hand from Taako’s hair. Lup can see the slow, rhythmic curl of his fingers, the gentle scratch of his fingernails against Taako’s scalp, and the way Taako’s eyelids droop at the touch. 

_If only magic could capture this moment in paper and glass_ , Lup thinks. _I would carry it with me forever._

“I really wasn’t anywhere, was I?” Taako mumbles, only just loud enough for Lup to overhear. “I guess when we die, we’re just gone.”

“Until we come back.” Barry’s voice wavers, the way it does when he pretends he’s certain, and he’s never been a very good actor, has he? 

“Until we come back.” Taako’s starting to drift. Lup can tell by the way his shoulders slump, the way the line of his neck relaxes. One hand bunches in the loose sleeve of Barry’s robe and hangs on. 

Minutes pass and Barry doesn’t move, ‘til Lup starts to wonder if he’s fallen asleep as well. She makes her way down the stairs. Barry holds a finger up to his lips when he sees her. 

“Psshhh, this little turd can sleep through a rave.” Sure enough, Taako doesn’t even stir when Lup bends over to kiss his cheek, nor when she tucks herself under Barry’s available arm. “Give it up, Bluejeans. We’ve got you surrounded. Gonna be sleeping under the stars tonight.” She wonders if she should have brought down a blanket. 

Barry’s arm is a reassuring weight around her shoulders as he shifts to make room for her. “Were you snooping?” he asks.

“Sure was! I know. I’m terrible. News at eleven.” She kisses the spot right behind Barry’s ear. “And now I’m going to distract you by being extra cute. I’ve got tricks, my man, I’ve got _ways_.”

“You’re devious,” Barry agrees, tilting his head so he can kiss her. 

Somewhere down the street, a door opens, releasing the faint trill of a flute out into the night. Up in the trees, a chorus of cicadas hums their own song. 

“Thank you,” Lup says, trusting Barry to know why.

“Anytime,” he says, and she trusts him to mean it.


	7. Chapter 7

“Where did you learn how to play?” Barry asks, and Lup lowers her bow. They’ve been practicing for hours, and Lup’s _jazzed_. She could go another several hours if she had to. Barry’s eyes sparkle as he rises from the piano bench, joints popping as he straightens out his spine with an ‘oof.’ 

“Here, let me.” Lup digs her thumbs in between his shoulderblades, and he winces then sighs as the muscles start to relax. She works on his neck, slow and thorough, relishing every small noise she manages to draw out of him. “There was this tiefling bard travelling with our caravan. She played all the inns along the route. I had the stupidest crush on her, you don’t even know, so I finally convinced her to give me violin lessons, as an excuse to spend more time with her. And then it turned out I was actually pretty good at it, so once we had a little bit more money, I kept it up.”

“She ever know about your crush?” 

“Oh, probably. You know me, subtle as _shit_. Here, get on the couch so I can do the rest of your back.” The overstuffed sofa in the room is almost perfectly Barry-sized. He deposits his glasses on top of the piano before lying face-down, one arm hanging over the side. The noise he makes when she puts her weight on his lumbar region is less sexy than expected, and Lup eases off, moving lower. She knows his back’s been bothering him this cycle, and the high summer humidity isn’t helping. “We good?”

“I think so? Ow, fuck.”

“Good ow?”

“Can’t tell.” 

There’s a dimple on his butt, right above his tailbone. It’s cute as heck, and also where a lot of the tension lives, Lup knows from experience. If her hands linger a bit more than strictly necessary, then they’re damn well allowed to. 

“Better,” he says after a while. 

She kisses the top of his head. “Glad I haven’t lost my touch.”

“So what happened with your bard?” he asks. 

Lup shrugs. “We reached Cloudridge and found another caravan. She stayed on with the old one.” 

“So you never…?”

The question honestly takes Lup by surprise. “Dude, I was like fifty and she wasn’t a creeper.” 

“Okay, fair. In my defense, you never told me how old you were. Hey,” Barry rolls over to face her. “Does it ever bother you?”

“Hmm?”

“That I’m… Shit, hold on, this is weird when I can’t see you.” Lup reaches over to grab his glasses and plonk them down on his face. “Thanks. I mean… I’m younger than you were, when you were the elf equivalent of a teenager. But when it comes to lifespan…” He looks away. “Either way you look at it, it’s a mess.”

_You’re my mess,_ Lup thinks. _I licked it, it’s mine._ She sits down on the floor next to the couch, head in his lap. “The old elf-human relationship dilemma. I was wondering when that would crop up.”

“So you’ve thought about it?”

“Does avoiding it count as thinking?” She takes his hand in hers, massaging the center of his palm, carefully stretching out the tendons in his wrist. “It’s not like either of us has aged over the last forty-seve years.”

“Yeah, but that’s normal for you.”

“What’s it like for you?” she asks. 

“Weird,” he admits. “But also kind of cool. Who knows if I would have had forty more years in me, if I stayed at home. Even without the Hunger. I get all this life I might not have gotten to have, hell if I’m gonna complain about it.” 

 

_Just forty years._ The thought hits Lup like a sucker punch. He could be _gone_ in only forty years, and there’s the thought she never wants to linger on, the poison pill in all her dreams of victory and peace. 

“I don’t want you to die,” she says. 

“You could always borrow my books and bring me back from the dead.” His tone is lighter than the conversation merits, teasing. 

Lup crosses her arms over her chest. “I would, don’t think I won’t. You’d make a sexy fucking zombie.” 

“They say that success depends largely on how far the soul has travelled, how willing it is to come back.”

Lup swallows hard. Jokes aside, there’s nothing she’d want less than something that looked like Barry but wasn’t him, could never be him. 

“I’d always come back for you,” Barry says. “No matter how far I am. All you’d have to do is call.” 

“It can’t be that easy,” Lup insists. “Otherwise, what’s preventing everyone from doing it.” 

Barry smiles ruefully. “The gods, mostly. They don’t like it when mortals mess with the natural way of things.”

“Then why allow magic like Necromancy to exist at all?”

“Who says it was allowed. We’re mortals, we do what we want.” Barry takes Lup’s hand. “We always find a way, that’s how we are, that’s how we’ve always been.” 

“Now there’s an attitude I can get behind. Never stop never stopping.” She looks him square in the eye. “Babe, if you think a piddly hundred-year age gap’s gonna make me keep my hands off of you, then you are blazing some serious four-twenty.” She pats his arm. “Also, I promise I’ll still like you when you can’t get it up anymore.” 

He groans. “You had to go there.”

“Contractually obligated. All I’m saying is, you’ve got a mouth and two hands. I’m sure you’ll find some way to keep me amused.”

“Okay. Great. This conversation is giving my dick anxiety.” 

“Poor baby.” Lup smirks. “What could I _possibly_ do to make it feel better?” And it’s oh-so-tempting to just lean closer, to mouth at the strip of skin between the hem of his t-shirt and the belt of his jeans. 

“You seriously don’t mind?” Barry asks. She can tell by his tone he ain’t talking blowjobs. 

Lup’s ear twitches. “Not unless you plan on treating me like some piece of barely-legal ass ripe for molding and teaching and whatever else the creepy fuck. Believe me, I’ve met the type.” Barry’s grip on her hand tightens. “I know how to take care of myself. Besides,” she adds. “I have more PhDs than you.”

“Just _one_ more PhD. That barely counts.”

“Keep telling yourself that, punk.” 

“So… We’re okay?”

Lup brushes her lips over his knuckles. “We were never not okay.” The future is hanging swords, but that’s how it’s always been. “Not that I don’t hella question your decisions, when you’ve got the hottest elf you’ve ever seen offering to give you head, and you’d rather talk about feelings.” 

“What, a guy can’t have both?” Laugh lines crease the corners of Barry’s eyes, and Lup loves him, brighter and hotter than she has ever intended. 

“So demanding,” she says, and rolls him off the couch and on top of her. 

***

Their melody soars all across the world, broadcast by the Light of Creation, and Lup’s heart soars with it. Every whisper of love and joy, every moment of hardship overcome so as to get them here: in that moment, she is known, _they_ are known. They are Lup and Barry, up on the stage, and they are everyone who has ever loved, and they are Lup and Barry alone, because no love can ever be exactly like another love. In that moment, they belong to the world, and the world belongs to them, and here, Lup thinks, with Barry’s hand in hers, is where she truly belongs, forever and always. 

And when they’re alone again, she sinks to one knee, only to bump into Barry and fall backwards on her ass, as he kneels at the exact same time. 

“You first,” she says, as he helps her back to her feet. 

“I uh…” A bead of sweat rolls down his face. “You should probably know I don’t have a ring on me. This isn’t the best-planned thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“Me too!” Lup interjects. “Man, we suck at this.” 

“We suck at this,” Barry agrees, and Lup cups his face in both her hands and says, “So, are we getting married or what?” 

Maybe they won’t get forever, but maybe they’ll take whatever fragment of forever they can get their hands on. 

***

“Barry and I are getting married,” she tells Taako on a drizzly morning, not long after the destruction of the Legato Consortium. Eggs sizzle in the pan, and for a moment, he doesn’t say anything at all. “‘Congratulations, Lup,’” she prompts, when the silence starts to get on her nerves. “‘I’m so happy for you, I’m gonna get off my ass and bake the biggest cake. Did I mention happy? Happy, happy happy!’”

What if he’s not? He’s not going to change her mind, but damn it, it still _matters_.

“What, you mean you’re not married already?” And the facade breaks and he grins, quicksilver and gone before she knows it. “The hell took you bozos so long?”

Lup stares at him. “You think I’m gonna do this without a huge party and a poofy princess dress, then you are one crazy bitch.” _You think I’m going to do this without you?_

“When’s the last time you wore a poofy dress?”

Lup grins. “The last time I got married.” Which is never. “You can pick out the bridesmaids’ outfits, but you def owe me that cake in return.” 

Taako puts his hands on his hips. “Well, I sure as shit am not gonna let Merle do it.” 

“Cake or dresses?”

“Either! He’d put weed in both.”

“That’s for the afterparty. You gotta have a sense of timing about these things.” The end of Taako’s braid has come loose, and she fiddles with it, gently tucking in the ends. “Promise you won’t tell the others til everything’s ready?”

He nods, and kisses her forehead, and everyone knows before the day is out, just like Lup had anticipated. She sits back and watches Merle and Davenport fight it out over who gets to officiate. Dav wins, on virtue of being the freaking captain. 

He’s solemn, his voice gone crackly with feeling, and they all avoid saying ‘til death do us part,’ and if Lup tears up a little when he pronounces them husband and wife, it’s no one’s fucking business but her own.


	8. Chapter 8

This has never been easy, but something about the Judges’ world sends them all pitching downhill. Barry takes more risks, dies more often, carries more scars when he doesn’t die. Magnus has been more cautious since they found Fischer, but Lup can see the little voidfish aging and braces herself for the loss to come. Who the hell even knows how long voidfish live?

After her lonely year, Lucretia has trouble sleeping on her own. She takes late night shifts up on the Starblaster with Davenport, helps Merle grind up herbs for a poultice, drifts off in the kitchen over breakfast. Lup stays awake with her a lot of the time, drinking and talking and eventually passing out in a heap. 

When Lucretia falls asleep in their bed, Barry tucks the blankets around her. “I’ll be in the lab,” he mouths at Lup. Lucretia whimpers in her sleep, and Lup pulls her closer, and Barry stays right where he is. 

Taako ribs them over their ‘threesome’ in the morning, like he and Creesh haven’t been falling asleep on each other for years, or like he’s never crawled in with Lup and Barry himself. Time and pain wear away boundaries, replacing them with a need for solace. It’s how they know they’re still alive. 

***

On cycle seventy-one, they crash-land right into a revolution. 

“Why are we doing this?” Taako asks Lup, sometime late in the pre-dawn ceasefire. He’s got a rag stuffed up his nose, refusing to tilt his head back on the principle that blood tastes like, and this is a direct quote, ‘gross pennies.’ Merle’s healing took care of his injuries, but there’s not much to be done for magical overexertion. It makes his voice sound fucking _extraordinary_. 

The sun will be rising soon. Lup shivers, digging her toes deeper into her boots. “Remember the first spell you cast?” 

Taako grins. “Prestidigi-fucking-tation. Warm up a cubic foot of log for an hour.” He wrinkles his nose, dislodging the rag and swearing as he sticks it back in. “That winter was shit.” 

“No, before that.”

“Disguise Self barely counts” The better to dodge the fuzz, after he got caught with a hand in someone’s purse. 

“Okay,” Lup concedes, “maybe it was after.”

“Mending your stupid shirt?”

“I Mended my own stupid shirt.” 

Magic has saved their bacon time and time again. Sure, they might have survived without it, useful enough to keep around. But there’s lots of uses for a pretty kid, most of them less than wholesome. 

“Remember Magnificent Mansion?”

Lup grins. “I can’t believe you actually managed to learn that one.” They’d managed to eat themselves sick in twenty-four hours. The prohibitive component cost kept them from casting it often, but Lup had gotten lucky picking some dignitary’s pocket. 

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Taako says. 

There’s no magic on this world. Sometimes, Lup wonders whether they’ve accidentally landed on the Plane of Thought, but the Light of Creation had cometed through the skies a week in, just like always. Wherever this is, they were meant to come here. 

“Clean your ears,” Lup says. 

Taako stares balefully at her. 

“Alright, wise guy. How else do you think we’re going to get the Light? Ask for it nicely?”

This world’s story is an old one. The powerful thrive; everyone else starves. The Light being found and secured by the local regime’s militia is not exactly a surprise. Those with the most resources have the best access. 

Taako lets out a dry laugh. “So it’s ‘fuck asking, just kill them and take their shit?’ Been a while since I saw you wear _that_ hat.”

“What?” Lup says. “I’ve got layers. Don’t you be judging my multi-dimensionality, dillweed.” 

He doesn’t get it, for all that his childhood and hers were one and the same. It’s not idealism driving Lup right now, nor pragmatism, nor even desperation. She sees a woman begging for coppers in the doorway of an inn; sees a boy lying in an alley, strung out on some alien drug, eyes wide open. She turns down a proposition from a human girl whose pomegranate lipstick barely hides a missing tooth, who can’t be more than fourteen or fifteen, and thinks _this could have been me._

***

Their magic gives them an edge, though spellcasting takes a major toll here. Lup wakes every morning with a pounding headache, until she has no choice but to sleep less and meditate more. It pisses her off. Sleep is a luxury, and meditation’s a joyless puddle of piss, but if someone dies while Lup’s blearing and moaning, she will never forgive herself. Worst part is it helps. 

Of the seven of them, she and Taako are hit the hardest. Magnus, with no magic of his own, seems as boisterous as ever. Barry and Merle manage. If Davenport or Lucretia is feeling the deficit, neither of them shows it. 

They find workarounds. Davenport swears he’ll dump ‘em in a ditch, if any of them work themselves into a coma. Lup knows it’s how he says ‘I love you.’

With magic on their side, they have an actual chance of winning. 

Assuming they don’t run out spell slots. 

***

Barry’s the first to slip up, skirting right to the edge of their defenses, hands in constant motion as he coaxes the enemy dead into turning their coats around. His spells have longer duration than most. It’s the only reason he’s still on his feet. 

The enemy soldiers may not have magic, but they sure have guns, and if the guns here aren’t nearly as cool as the ones on what Magnus calls ‘Robit World;’ even if they jam and run out of bullets when you need them most, they sure as shit can still kill you. The sniper’s bullet goes through Barry’s side, and Lup thinks, _he’ll be fine, that didn’t hit any organs._ Merle will get to him in a second. 

The bullet’s just a distraction. 

Barry stumbles, and finds himself surrounded in seconds. Lup’s Meteor Swarm takes out a flank, but the enemy’s organization and discipline is eons better than she gave them credit for. They must have been gunning for Barry specifically. No one likes a zombie up their ass. 

They drag him out into the square, force him down onto his knees. Lup refuses to look away, barely feeling Merle’s grasp on her arm. She knows from experience what sorts of bruises the barrel of a gun might leave as it’s jammed against your forehead, execution-style. She feels the pain like it’s an echo of her own, and she refuses to look away. Someone yells ‘fire!’ and Barry’s eyes dart wildly, trying to find her in the crowd, and she refuses to look away. 

He’s not scared of dying, none of them are anymore, but knowing’s one thing, and feeling is another. Everyone’s mortal in those final, thunderous seconds. 

His body falls. Merle pulls her back, and she lets him. 

“It never gets easier, does it?” 

Lup’s eyes are completely dry. “What happens when it does?” she asks. 

“Then it gets easier,” Merle says. “That and you start to spook your ol’ teammates.” 

There’s blood on Lup’s mouth, where she’s bitten right through her lip. She wipes it away. “Not there yet,” she says. 

She’s got work to do. 

With Barry gone, his spells are already starting to unravel, and like it or not, the undead remain one of the best weapons at their disposal. “Psychological warfare,” Cap’nport had called it. Lup closes her eyes, reaches for the fading threads of magic, against all reason of how this should work. She’s watched Barry at his spellcraft often enough to know the basics, but what she’s doing right now isn’t simple imitation. ‘Please,’ she begs the magic, like it’s some kind of sentient creature. ‘I’m not him, but I love him more than you can imagine. Please, let that be enough.’ 

A sharp sensation, like a fishhook through the sternum, and power floods her, bright and pure as adrenaline. It’s too much, some part of her knows this. It might not be enough. 

It will have to be. 

Lup rises to her feet, and all around her, the dead start to rise from their slumped positions, and with them, the people also rise. 

***

Fire burns in the space behind her eye sockets and copper coats the back of her throat. She’s gone beyond spell slots, casting from something deeper, casting flecks of blood and tatters of her very soul into the wind. 

Another step, another Fireball, weak but strong enough to spark a powderkeg far on the other side. Someone cheers. They’re winning. They’re going to win. 

Sharp concrete under her cheek. Someone’s hands shaking her. Someone’s voice screaming in her ear. 

_See you next year,_ she thinks.

There are almost six months left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You do not even want to know how many drafts this chapter has gone through.


	9. Chapter 9

Coming back from the dead doesn’t hurt. Sometimes, Lup almost wishes it did. There’s a rightness to the idea; pain as the wound slowly knits back together. Instead, she feels herself spark from nothing back to something. White threads reshape her hands, and there is touch. White tendrils in her throat, and she draws a shaky breath, tasting the air. She opens her eyes, reaches for Taako’s sleeve. He’s always by her side, when they reform. 

He’s never shaken off her hand before. Never moved away, glaring. 

“‘ko?” Lup hates the way her voice sounds, scratchy and uncertain. 

“Oh,” he says flatly. “You’re back.” 

Guilt mixes with irritation, churning in her belly. “Who the fuck pissed in your porridge?” This isn’t the first time she’s died and come back. Why the cold shoulder now?

His hands are shaking, even stuffed deep into the pockets of his robe. “That was the stupidest-!” 

Lup snorts. “Puh-leeze, I’ve died way stupider than that. Remember the bearcat?” It’s not _her_ fault it looked so soft and pettable and found elves a delicacy. 

“You blew out your fucking brain.” 

“She did what?” Barry comes up behind her, face white. 

She puts her hand on his shoulder. “Not like that, babe.” The way Taako makes it sound, it’s like she’d committed suicide in a bullshit fit of grief. “Got a little overloaded is all.” 

“A-a little overloaded.” Taako doesn’t normally stutter. Not unless he’s excited, or in the throes of a crazy plan. “That’s a good one. 

“And you.” He whirls on Barry. “She died because of you. It didn’t take, so I’ll forgive you eventually, but for now? Go back to acting like you’re still dead, okay?” It’s almost a nice request, almost gentle the way he says it. 

“Okay,” Barry says. 

Lup throws up her hands. “You’re gonna just let him-? You know what, okay, fine, whatever.” 

Barry rubs his temples. Takes off his glasses to clean them on his shirt. “I have no idea what’s going on. If I start arguing now, all I’m doing is making it worse.” He leaves the room without saying another word. 

“You’re being a shit,” Lup tells her beloved brother. 

He doesn’t respond. The rest of the crew have all found somewhere else to be. 

“Did you at least find the Light?” she asks. 

“Yeah,” Taako says, arms crossed over his chest. “I found the _fucking_ Light. That piece of shit world with its piece of shit inhabitants, it’s all still there. I hope you’re happy.”

“They deserved a chance,” Lup says. “Being ruled by dicks doesn’t mean they weren’t worth saving.” 

Taako glares at her. “Do I look like I care?” 

“Maybe you should.”

“And maybe you should try being a corpse less often. Then you might get a say in the matter.” 

There’s no use talking to him when he’s like this. Lup turns on her heel. Later, she will recall the lost look on Taako’s face as she storms out. Later, she might feel bad for not being the adult, this one time, but for now slamming the door and letting her twin sulk to his heart’s content is just what the doctor ordered. 

***

Her memories are blurry. A voice which isn’t a voice, echoing in her mind. _‘So you love him. Do you think that’s enough?’_

Outside, in the real world, a gunshot echoes. Something wooden cracks down the middle. Someone dies, without her ever knowing.

She falters. _‘I don’t know. No.’_

_‘Then why bother asking?’_

_‘Why the fuck not? What do I have to lose?’_

_‘Do you love him enough to die for him?’_ the not-voice persists, and Lup, who’s always been taught to bargain, chokes down a laugh.

_‘Define dying.’_

_‘Is he the only one you’ve ever loved? Would you give up everything in the world just to have him?’_

_‘No.’_ The answer echoes through the foundation of what makes her Lup. 

_‘No?’_

She thinks of Taako, hat sliding down his face, hair full of twigs, his smile unguarded for a brief, precious moment. She thinks of the crew gathered around a table, fighting over the biscuits; of a half-grown mongoose, its tiny legs propped up on her boot; of an old man reloading a musket with rheumy hands, handing it off to a scrawny halfling boy. 

She thinks of Barry, who still carries that picture of his family; who has found and loved a second family, after all those years. _‘He wouldn’t want me to,’_ she says, or doesn’t say. _’That’s why I love him.’_

You can’t love one person and turn your back on everyone else and still call it love. 

_‘Do you love everyone here?’_ the not-voice asks her.

Lup shakes her head, as much as she can without moving. _‘Since when do I have to?’_

_‘Do you think you can help everyone?’_

_‘Gonna try anyway,_ Lup replies, and magic floods her soul, and something says, _‘so be it.’_

***

Claudia’s always told her not to cook angry, said it would curdle a sauce every time, but there’s something deeply satisfying about pissed-off mise-en-place. Lup slides the tip of her knife between the bones of a chicken thigh, popping the joint with a vicious crack. She decimates carrots, celery and onions into small, biddable chunks, and for a little while, the world makes sense again. 

That’s where Taako finds her. He doesn’t go out of his way to start a conversation; he just grabs a handful of freshly-shelled peas and pops them in his mouth, and it’s so _normal_ , Lup could scream. 

“Whatcha, uh, whatcha making?” he says after a good ten minutes of silence. 

“Don’t know yet,” Lup says. And okay, how badly does she _want_ this to be normal? Badly. Like, a lot. It would be so easy to pretend they never argued. He hugged her after she came back, and made a joke to break up the somber mood, and nothing had to change. “You hungry?” she asks. 

“Nah, I ate.” He steals another pea. Lup wishes she had wooden spoon to whap his hand with. Brandishing a knife at your brother is only light banter in very, very specific circumstances. “You?” Taako’s ears twitch. “Uh, stupid question, that’s why you’re cooking, right. So, does coming back from the dead make you hungry? It always makes me hungry. Or maybe I was just hungry when we, uh, you know, embarked.”

Lup closes her eyes, puts the knife down. “I remember. You couldn’t eat anything the night before, or that morning.” Neither could she. 

“This was going to be the best thing we’ve ever done.” Taako’s ear twitches. “What a joke, ‘m I right? Like we were ever gonna settle for some freakin’-” He cuts himself off. “Fuck, Lulu, I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. Lost track of that sentence, ka-whoops, there it went.” 

“You’re a dummy,” Lup says, but there’s no heat in it.

Taako’s mouth quirks up into a half-smile. “That’s me. Just a simple idiot wizard.”

Lup holds the knife out to him, handle-first. “Think you’re up to the staggering task of peeling me some potatoes, dummy?”

“Without a peeler?” Taako gives her the most offended look. “You’re a monster.” 

“It’s your punishment for being a turd.” 

“Uh-huh. Y’know I’m just gonna use magic to do it.” 

“Weak.”

“You say ‘weak,’ I say ‘lateral thinking.’”

“How the fuck is magic lateral? You’re a fucking wizard.” 

The potatoes are dancing in the air now, peel unwinding in ribbons. It’s showy as hell, Taako all over, and she laughs, and the sound of it’s like glass breaking, leaving shallow slashes on her heart and healing it better all at the same time. 

***

“So is it just me, or are these planes getting crappier?” Magnus props his feet up on the couch, boots and all. “Like, have we already used up all the good ones, and this is it?” 

Lup scrubs a hand over her face. “Sooo not just you, Mags. You wanna coffee? I wanna coffee. I wanna coffee with booze in it.” They’re out of booze, and their patrol is several hours late, and she knows for a _fact_ there are slaver gangs roaming around, just fucking _dying_ to nab random civilians and sell them off to fuck knows where. Literally dying, if Lup can help it, which she can’t, seeing as she’s back here, safe on the Starblaster, while her brother and husband are out on recon. 

Magnus’s hand tangles in her hair as he goes to ruffle it. “Oop, there I go.” His laughter is brittle, but he’s _Magnus_ so she can’t help laughing along, glad for his company and warmth.

The door bangs open. Instinct more than motion propels Lup onto her feet and she’s running toward the two bedraggled figures in the entryway. She’s there to catch Taako before he crumples. “What- what the hell happened?” If someone needs to die tonight, Lup’s got spell slots coming out her ass. She can make it happen. 

“Got ambushed.” Barry doubles over panting, hands on his knees. “Taako teleported us out. They can’t follow.”

“Yeah, dudes, we’re good.”

“You don’t sound so good.” Magnus says what Lup is thinking. She can feel blood on her hands where she’s holding him up, still tacky. Magnus is already hollering for Merle. 

Taako laughs, burbly and weak. “Maggie, m’dude, you waited up for me. That’s so sweet.” Lup’s seen the way he hovers right in Magnus’s space sometimes, not quite touching but comfortable and _there_ , and she’s wondered more than once. No point in prying. Taako will tell her when he’s ready. 

Lup’s knees are shaking as she lowers him carefully onto the couch. “And what am I, chopped wyvern liver?” 

Merle stumbles in, still half asleep. Lup can’t remember when he started casting Spare the Dying and Cure Wounds all in one breath, but she figures it can’t hurt. Spare the Dying is a cantrip, after all. 

Taako swears. “Oh, ow, fuck, why does it hurt more now? Merle, my man, you fucked up.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re not in shock anymore,” Merle grumbles. “It’s fine. No need to thank me.” Lup shoots him a grateful look and he nods, yawning. “Anyone else about to croak here?”

Barry shakes his head. His clothes look scorched, but Lup knows how he acts when he’s trying to cover up an injury, and this isn’t it. 

“What _happened_?” Lup asks again. 

Taako rolls his eyes. “Teach your nerd how to fucking dodge. Like, make a kinky game out of it and never, ever tell me.” 

“I tried,” Barry points out. He looks exhausted. 

“If that was you trying, your AC sucks donkey balls.”

Barry mutters something about negative dex modifiers, and something clicks in Lup’s head. “You took a hit for him.” 

“Would I do that?” Taako sprawls grandly all across the couch. Lup’s pretty sure he’s getting blood all over it, but that’s what Prestidigitation is for. He’s somehow managed to box Magnus in, to keep him from fleeing the vicinity. 

“Yeah, but did you?” Magnus asks. 

Taako looks away, scratching his ear. “Yeah. Well. Wasn’t going to lose both these jackasses again. That’s all.” 

“Oh, okay,” Magnus says. “That makes sense.” 

“We’re never speaking of this again,” Taako says flatly. 

Lup perches on the arm of the couch, at his side. “You wouldn’t, you know. Lose both of us.” Well, okay, he might. Shit happens every cycle, but it certainly wouldn’t be on any kind of purpose. 

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “I know. What part of not talking about it did’ja miss?” 

“The part where you’re dumb,” Barry says. 

“Eat a golf cart, Barold.” 

Magnus is the first to lose it, giggling like a little kid, head thrown back. 

“Why a golf cart?” Merle manages between chortles.

“Because I said so,” Taako says, head held high, reigning over the room, and Lup’s on her ass, whole body shaking with the release of tension, eyes streaming with tears and laughing all stupid, and Barry’s at her side, arm around her shoulders, and maybe, just maybe they’re going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from poem by Nikita Gill, by way of [this gorgeous art-set](http://mllelaurel.tumblr.com/post/164880480450/kaylabarart-93-stardust-nikita-gill-i-really).


End file.
